Diana's Knife
by Survivah
Summary: Collection of oneshots, Post-"Lies". To Diana, what is and what isn't no longer exist. Only dead faces and a murmur from something she can only see from the corners of her eyes.
1. Diana's Knife

Diana leaned against the kitchen counter, some fancy thing made of granite that could have been a picture in a magazine. In another life, she would have been thrilled to be here, looking at the inside of "Toddifer's" celebrity crib, with it's perfect color scheme and tasteful paintings, but now, all she could do was look at the impressive collection of knives hanging on the wall over the sink and imagine all the bloody things she could do with them. Featuring prominently in her visions was the alluring prospect of picking up the biggest, sharpest one, a vicious looking cleaver, and stabbing herself straight through the heart with it.

It would be so easy. And Caine was liable to do it himself anyway, the mood he was in, so why not beat him to the punch? Diana was already bruised, beaten, and scurvy-laden, so what should stop her from adding one last injury to the lot? Diana could imagine the headlines, "Girl Found Dead in Toddifer's Kitchen, Scorned Mistress?", or, "Was Diana a Freak? Katie Couric Investigates" "Did The FAYZ Push Diana Ladris Over The Edge? New Studies Show..."

So easy. So very easy. Except for Caine, who was just across the hall, looking for supplies. He was always in the other room. And try as she might, Diana couldn't ever bring herself to leave him. She'd jumped off cliffs, even, and had her brains bashed in by a boulder, and yet he always managed to swoop in just in time to save her. So now here she was, trapped on the private island of quite possibly the most famous couple since Brangelina, wondering what to do about her megalomaniacal, telekinetic almost-boyfriend.

Diana could remember a time when it was so much easier to understand him, before pain and starvation and the madness that was the FAYZ had warped Caine almost beyond recognition.

When Caine had first come to Coates Academy, before the gaiaphage had tormented his mind and before weeks of canned spinach had sucked away all the flesh from his face, he had been blisteringly handsome, with the sort of charisma that could even attract the damaged, messed-up kids of Coates. Within the first week half of the girls at Coates had a crush on him, and yes, he had even caught Diana's eye. Icy, you-take-your-hands-off-of-me-before-I-break-them-off Diana. Not that she really liked him, per se, he never featured in her daydreams or made her heart beat fast when he came near, but even she couldn't deny he had a sort of magnetism. Early on, she had pegged him for one of those kids that had been sent off to Coates by his parents for a fairly innocent reason, for something silly like letting his grades drop, or getting friendly with the "wrong crowd", whatever that meant. She had seen him, seen through him, then filed him away in the "not worth bothering with" file in her head and gone on her merry way.

But he had to go and get infatuated with her, always nodding in his smooth way at her whenever they passed in the halls, and making conversation at every opportunity. If he were anybody else, he would've have seemed like a creepy puppy dog, but Caine could pull it off, and even though Diana never showed him the slightest little bit of genuine affection, only carefully calculated smiles and touches to keep him dancing to her tune, they eventually came to know eachother well enough that when Caine first discovered his power, she was he first person he told.

Looking back, Diana was certain that the day he pulled her into an empty classroom and threw a textbook across the room without touching it was the day everything started to go wrong. At first, it was exciting, like she was a star in some supernatural T.V. show. Diana would detect the kids with powers, and Caine would sidle up to them and invite them to test out their powers with the rest of his freaks, and they would have another kid join the ranks of Caine's superheroes.

Then the grownups had gone, the wall appeared, and the FAYZ was born.

Even then, it was sort of an adrenaline rush to rule over Perdido Beach with Caine, even if she had to put up with that little nutjob Drake. She had felt like a queen, co-ruler of the FAYZ, and somewhere along the way she had found herself getting attached to Caine a bit more than she had intended. Diana couldn't make herself just cut and run when things got bad, and even after the battle, standing in the ruins of the church, little kids screaming and those ungodly wolves running about, wreacking havoc, she found herself leaving with Caine, even when Sam gave her the chance to stay in Perdido Beach and live as normal a life as she could manage in the FAYZ.

Diana knew she should have regretted leaving with Caine, but she had known even then that the bad boy and bad girl had to stick together, even when times got tough. Because that was what they were, the two of them, weren't they? Villains. Even now, stranded, hurt, screwed up, and with every last one of their followers gone, they were still together, for some reason Diana was afraid to admit to herself

And when, not an hour before, she stood on that cliff outside and told Caine she loved him, and stopped him from crashing the escaping helicopter, and he levitated her back onto solid ground, she knew she would have stayed with him even if they weren't trapped together. Even if she hadn't known where those fateful three words had popped out from, she knew they were true, even if the utter sappiness of them made her feel a wee bit nauseated.

So there she stood, a girl in love, eyeing a knife collection and wondering if she should be watching out any sort of mutant animals lurking somewhere on the island. Diana sighed and walked away from the shelf of knives. Not today. She wandered into the other room and flopped onto the designer couch, not caring about the remnants of Cheeto dust still lingering there, not worrying about where her next meal would be coming from, and let herself sleep.

She woke to Caine's murmered "Wake up."

"What?"

He looked as tired as she felt, oddly vulnerable with the giant shadows under his eyes. "I found some vitamin C. That Sanjit kid said you needed it for your scurvy." He thrust out a platinum white bottle that rattled.

"Thanks."

And then, ever so carefully, Diana squeezed his hand, and then he, ever so carefully, squeezed back.


	2. Diana's Guilt

Diana didn't used to have trouble eating meat. You could never have called her a hardcore carnivore, but she wouldn't say no to barbecue, and was a consummate lover of fish sticks. Except that now, looking down at the reconstituted chicken leg that Caine had scrounged up from the industrial size freezers downstairs, she found herself more than a little nauseous. And Diana couldn't pretend she didn't know why.

It must have been more than a week ago that she had eaten human meat, but Diana could have sworn she could still feel it's taste on her tongue. Diana was, by all definitions, one stone cold bitch, but even she could feel the taint of cannibalism on her soul. Now, even the thought of dong t agan made her sick, but at the time, swallowing down the slimy, half cooked meat, Diana hadn't been thinking anything. All she remembered was that clawing, raging, hunger flip-flopping around in her gut, urging her to chew, chew, grab another bite, and push Bug out of the way so she could rip a bigger piece of flesh off of what must have been Panda's chest.

To Diana, that seemed the worst part of the whole deal. Panda. She had known him, not liked him, but known him well enough that whenever she remembered the grisly scene of that night, she couldn't help but imagine his half-burnt, dented face alive agan, staring at her, watching her rip the flesh off his bones and accusing her for what she had done. Not me, she wanted to cry. Caine, Caine, it was all his idea!

Diana watched him from across the table. He was tucking in with no apparent guilt, and was already on his second leg. She wanted to believe it was his hunger that let him devour the meat so easily, but she was as hungry as he was, and couldn't bring herself to touch the meat. These last few months in the FAYZ had convinced Diana that the deadliest weapon you could unleash on a people was hunger. Not only did it kill them slowly and painfully, but it would drive them mad, make little kids attack their neighbor's pets, eat rats raw, brandish kitchen knives at their closest friends for the tiniest scraps, and tell a group of teenagers that if they wanted to eat, they had better wheel the corpse of -what? an ally? a friend?- up to the wreckage of their old boarding school to cook his dead body into so much hamburger meat.

Caine noticed her staring. "What?"

"How can you do that so easily?" Diana found herself asking. "Don't you get guilty?"

"About what?"

"Panda! I can't make myself eat meat anymore because whenever I try, all I can see is his corpse!"

Caine resumed eating. "You better get over that quickly if you don't want to starve."

"Then I'll starve! I can't take this...this guilt! I'm not used to it! Doesn't that happen to you, Caine? Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think about all the things we've done? It knaws worse than the hunger."

Caine shook hs head, exhasperated. He wasn't used to this divergence from the usual calm, cool, never-show-weakness Diana.

But then her face went blank, and she stood up, chicken leg still clutched in her hand, and shot a carefully targeted homing missile. "I guess you're no different from Drake, then."

There it was, the one thing Diana could say to him and not get away with. Caine rose to his feet, face distorted wth rage. "Don't talk about him to me!"

Diana just shot him an icy look and walked out of the house.

She stumbled to the cliff face and collapsed there, lying on her stomach and watching the waves crash by. Wind whipped by her face as she screamed with all her might at the FAYZ wall, "It's only a FAYZ!It's only a FAYZ!It's only a FAYZ!It's only a FAYZ!It's only a FAYZ!" She felt something wet trickle down her cheek, and laid her head down in the grass, shakng wth silent tears.

"Diana! Don't you dare try jumping again!" It was Caine, palms outstretched towards her.

Except something had already broken in Diana.

"I won't." She whispered. "No point. I'm stuck. Trapped. This is hell isn't it?" She screeched at the wall again. "This is hell!" She convulsed on the ground, screaming. " No turning back. Can't go home. No point."

Then she stood up and walked back to Caine, taking bites of Panda as she went.


	3. Caine's Fifteen

Caine was rather irritated, looking at Diana's passed out form on the couch. She was twitching and muttering worriedly in her sleep, tossing back and forth, and murmuring disturbing things about blood and killing and guilt guilt guilt.

"I should have just let you go over the cliff." He grumbled to himself. "It'd be easier than having to deal with your wacko self anyway."

But he couldn't do that. Not now, not ever. Caine had trouble justifying his irrational attraction to Diana, even now. The best explanation he could come up with was that perhaps even people as powerful as he was had to have at least one fatal weakness. And she was deadly. Diana was cold and unloving, manipulative, and by most definitions, a bitch, but Caine had never regretted loving her, because when she showed affection, as rare as it was, it would make him blissfully happy.

Caine knew it was an awfully sentimental sort of concept, but for him, even before the FAYZ wall came up, happiness had been hard to come by. Caine's life was made up of nothing but plotting and the occasional nap, in which, he was pretty sure, he would plot in his sleep. His family, -fake family, he reminded himself- was too busy propelling hm up the academic ladder to offer him many charming family moments, and Coates Acadamy wasn't exactly the most nurturing environment, so Caine was rarely happy. Content, perhaps, but scaring the hell out of the weak couldn't give him the same rush Diana gave him when she allowed him one of her small smiles or let him kiss her, even if he never knew why she did it.

Early on, Caine had been perplexed by the idea of attraction beyond the physical "oh-look-that-girl-is-really-hot" hormonal response, but eventually he figured out that he did, in fact, love Diana, the cold, unloving, manipulative bitch. He loved that she never backed down to hm even when everyone else was on their knees, and he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, even after she had shaved her hair off. And she knew it, too. Cane couldn't pretend he didn't know she could control him like a lovesick puppy when she wanted too, but thankfully, they usually wanted the same things, so he could go along with her wishes and his at the same time.

Hesitantly, he reached out and smoothed a piece of hair away from her face. She shuddered under his hand, but stayed in her fevered hair sort of crackled as it moved, brittle and dry, worrying Caine a little. To lose her after all they had been through to scurvy, of all things, the pirate disease, might just drive him as nuts as she was.

"Why'd you have to get guilty, Diana?" He asked her closed eyes. "You couldn't have just stayed in denial like a good little girl? Times are tough, I know. Being stranded on an island seems like the least of our problems most of the time, but you didn't have to actually go insane. At least I had an excuse. The Darkness was in my head when I lost it. But you, Diana, you don't have to do this. What's a wee bit of cannibalism when you're starving? It was my idea. It was my idea!

"Damn it, Diana!" Caine hurled a painting across the room using only his outsretched palm. " I love you, and you love me, you admitted it, you did! Damn it all if this isn't just the goddamn worst timing ever. Damn! Why won't you just get better, you bitch!"

Her eyes flickered open, glazed and bloodshot like she had gotten off of a bender worse than the kids in Perdido Beach were always doing. "Caine? What is it? Are the coyotes back?" She shook. "I let them kill so many people. I ripped so many people to shreds. Just kids. They were only kids!" Diana screamed at him, "They were only kids!"

Caine was on her in a second, before she went lunging at something sharp again. He trapped her arms against her sides. She kept doing this, waking up, screaming about one mostrosity or another, switching from one topic to another, acting like, well, a mental patient. "Easy Diana, easy. You're just having another...episode. I'm going to get you some more water. The tables sure have turned now, haven't they?"

Caine turned away, tossing a weak chuckle in her direction. He wasn't used to actually doing grunt work, but there weren't any more followers to order around, and for Diana, he suppossed, he could bear the indignity of rooting around in the wreck of semi-clean dishes for a glass that was relatively intact.

"The tables have turned." Diana whispered. " Oh yes, I remember when you were sick. I had to clean up so much shit! I brought you a lot of water too, didn't -oh! You threw... someone through a wall! Right through a wall! That's fifteen then."

"Fifteen what?"

"People I killed. But I'm not done counting yet."

Caine grimaced. Something didn't seem quite right about what she said. "But I killed that kid. You had nothing to do with any of that. Diana, you had nothing to do with that. Just drink."

He sat down next to her, wrapping one arm around her shoulders in case she started struggling again, and offered the cup of water in the his other hand. Diana sipped obediently. "I should have stopped you."

"And I shouldn't have made you eat Panda."

"How will I ever tell my parents what I've done?"

"We've done. And I don't think you'll have to worry about them for a while."

Diana gulped down the last of her water, and looked at him from what seemed to be the bottom of a deep hole. "I'm so tired of it all, Caine. So sick of the fighting and the controlling and the mutants, and the freaks, the hunger, the madness. It's going to drive me quite insane."

"God forbid. Hell, Diana, you want to just stay here for a while? No evil plans, I promise. It's just that Perdido Beach certainly wasn't doing you any good, and I think-"

"Like a vacation."

"Yeah."

"I'd like that." They sat quietly for a few minutes, looking at the scattered pieces of canvas strewn across the room.

"Diana, you know I love you, right?"

"Yeah. Kind of a stupid thing to do."

"I know."

"Good."


	4. Diana's Dream

Diana knew her head wasn't on quite straight anymore. She knew perfectly well that most kids, even post-FAYZ kids, didn't see dead people in the corners of their eyes that weren't really there, or fall into bone crushing spells of PTSD-ness every now and then, forcing them to curl up into a tight ball on the couch, shaking as semi-suppressed memories cropped up again in their minds. She couldn't even pretend she was sane, not that there was any reason to pretend, with only her and Caine on a deserted island.

But the full-on hallucinations were a new thing.

Diana was sitting on a hillside covered with grass that was a little softer than grass really should be, with a soft breeze running it's fingers through her hair, somehow leaving it soft and tangle-free. The pure blue sky wasn't warped by any FAYZ wall, and the intricate looking clouds scudding their way across the horizon threatened no rain. There were a few daisies bobbing their heads down the slope from her, red petals softly dripping blood that flowed in little rivulets down to the bottom of the hill, where they pooled and made a scarlet mirror. Diana looked at the reflection of her own calm face in the pool staring back at her, then laid back next to Caine and watched the clouds float by.

"Darling, do you think that one looks like a heart?" Caine asked her quietly, wrapping one of his hands around hers, and using the other to point above him.

"I guess so." She mused. "I can see right where the arteries were ripped out of the chest. It's pretty acurate. But I thought the one that looked like a coyote was a bit more interesting."

Caine looked at it. "That's not a coyote, that's a rattlesnake with eagle's wings."

"Another one Honey?"

Caine sighed, and grabbed at the golden wicker picnic basket. "At least it isn't attacking us like last time. You hungry, sweetie?"

He pulled out a picnic blanket so gingham that looked like it belonged on Dorothy's dress and laid it on the red-stained ground, then a vase of headless roses, thorns bristling, and two rare steaks, sprinkled with a collection of herbs and spices worthy of any self-respecting cooking show, and dripping some scrumptious looking liquid. Together they dined on the hill of bodies they had made, watching a herd of small children being shepherded by a glowing green creature with a pack of coyotes acting as sheepdogs. It was so lovely. Diana could just see days of lazing away under a blue sky, sleeping under the stars, dancing on hills of grass and dead arms-

No. No that wasn't right. Diana didn't want that. Not more deaths on her hands, not more voices whirling through her dreams, screaming "Nodon'tdoitihavealittlebrotherandeI'?!"

Diana didn't want to hear that again. But the shephard, the green thing, the darkness and the Gaiaphage spoke to her, sold her stories of her own blood free meadow, and safety, and a full stomach, if only she would do one little thing...onelittle...onelittle...

"No!" Diana screamed, and saw the sky, then the ground, and then her world fade away to black.

Until it was just Diana, alone in the darkness.

"Diana!"

But now out of the void came a hand, and an arm. Then a chest and a set of legs and a gaunt, half worried, half exasperated face, then finally the background. The real world. A stylish living room, stained with cheeto dust, movie posters, and old laundry that wasn't even hers.

Caine dragged her up off of the floor. "Come on Diana, it's all right."

"No, I won't. I won't I can't I won't."

Caine looked bemused. "Then don't?"

Diana shot an exhasperated look at him. "I said I wouldn't. I love you, so I can't. It can't make me."

There was such a desperate look in her eyes that even Caine backed up a step. "That's an awfully crazy thing to say. We should look through that mini pharmacy Toddifer has downstairs and find some antipsychotics for you."

Diana smirked, gazing blankly out the window. "It fades. Everything is only a FAYZ, after all."

"The love thing or the crazy thing?"

"Both, probably." Diana wandered away. "Everything fades."


	5. Diana's One Little Thing

"ehehehehe"

"Stop that."

"But its so soft. Like one of those clouds you see in March."

"Diana, stop that!" snapped Caine. "Maybe I gave you a bit too much. You don't seem to be taking this stuff well."

Diana looked up from the floor of her Toddifer's alphabetically categorized, personal shopper-organized, big-as-her-own-garage closet and the powder blue sweater she was rubbing across her face.

"What? No, I'm fine. High as a kite."

"That's what I was afraid of." He grumbled.

Diana giggled. The anti psychotics tickled her brain. Much better than anything in her dad's old booze cabinet.

Diana pulled the sweater over her head. "This is probably cashmere. Good stuff, cashmere. I remember Marie used to take me shopping for this sort of thing all the time."

Caine looked up from the set of drawers he was rooting through. "Wasn't that your dad's mistress?"

"Yeah. She was the family's friend though. Wait, a friendly family. No-" she giggled. "a family friend. The bitch kept on trying to make me like her, taking me shopping, buying me stuff. As if." Diana snorted. Marie had always seemed sort of fake to her, like one of those dolls that everybody always complained about because the proportions made fat little girls feel bad about themselves. The woman was always setting herself up as Diana's mother. Just waiting for Diana's father to serve the divorce papers so she could step in and assume the role of wealthy trophy wife.

Damn that woman. Diana tried to stand up, and reeled backwards as the walls around her turned bright, phosphorescent green for a split second. That reminded her... she was supposed to do something... but no thoughts could come through the pleasantly humming wall of drugs floating across her brain.

Caine pulled a pristine white button-up out of the cabinet and pulled it around his bare chest. "That's better. I'm surprised it took us this long to find their closet. At any rate, I always think better when I'm not covered in blood." He adjusted the collar, a perfect picture of a private school brat. "I was thinking, this place is a great tactical stronghold. There's no food here, but once we get some kind of transport going on, we've got enough random extra supplies here that we can squeeze those Perdido Beach freaks to within an inch of their mutant lives. What I would do to have my idiot brother here right now..."

"Caine."

He cleared his throat. "Sorry. I'm trying to keep it to a minimum, but it's my nature, Diana, you know it is."

They stood in silence. Diana felt something at the corner of her mind, a tugging, a one little something she was supposed to do, but she just couldn't remember what it was. Somewhere in between dreams and reality, she had been told to do something... something that would make her heart hurt in a way it never had... but it was gone. Lost in a haze of meds and a maze of screwed up neurological processes. She giggled. Neurological processes. Sounded like something her psychologist would have said.

Caine, alerted by her giggling, glanced at her. "Are you okay? That stuff can't be wearing off yet, you've got to have at least six more hours."

Diana didn't say a word. She looed more lost than usual, like she was concentrating on something noone else could see.

Caine sighed. He didn't know why he bothered with her, sometimes. "Diana, you really need to just pick something out."

"No! Wait, what?" She stared at him as if he had pulled her out of some horrendous nightmare.

"Clothes, Diana. You need to get new ones."

Caine shook his head, sending his limp hair sliding across his face, and pulled some kind of designer wrap off of a hanger next to him , and pulled it over Diana's head. She sort of returned to normal then, and peeled her old rags off her body from underneath the silken confection of an outfit, then even washed her face with some kind of exfoliating pad she found in the monstrous vanity.

But Diana couldn't get herself tostop her hands from shaking, because she had just remembered what it was she had to do.


	6. Caine's Countdown

"Right." said Diana. "Let's get this over with. Sit down." She snapped her scissors decisively.

Caine sat. "I don't see why you can't just shave it all off."

She started pulling a comb through his hair, trying to ignore exactly how much of it was falling out at her touch. "Because I don't want us to have matching haircuts. I've been meaning to fix your hair for a while now, and since the meds are finally wearing off a little, I'm in the right mind to do it."

Caine shook his head. "It's weird."

"Stop moving."

"Sorry. It's just that I was thinking Todd probably had some mental issues himself. All the books in his study have titles like: "Coping with Stalkers: Life Under the Paparazzi's Lens." and "Fame, Fortune, and Fanaticism." or "So Now I'm a Celebrity, What Can I Do About It?" No light reading for him."

"Oh the things we could sell the tabloids if things were back to normal." Diana agreed as she snipped away at Caine's temples. Clumps of hair drifted to the marble floor like feathers.

"You better not make it as stupid as Astrid made Sam's hair."

Diana stabbed her scissors into the couch next to her. The velour creaked as it ripped. "Goddamn it, Caine! You need to stop getting so hung up about Sam. Every day it's Sam this and Sam that. He's not even here and you act like he's the third person in the room. And then you'll start on about Nurse Temple. "Oh Boohoo she abandoned me, she picked Sam over me, what does he have that I don't have?" Stop comparing yourself to him like that. You aren't him, he isn't you. Not even close. He's not even your brother."

"Yes he _is_, Diana, you know he is. I have proof-"

"No." Diana cut in. "You have proof of a similarity between genes. That does not make him your brother. Unless you grew up with him, ate with him, tattled on him, or gave him a marker tattoo, it doesn't count. What you have, my dear Caine, is an inferiority complex. Or something. I'd have to ask my shrink."

Caine struggled with himself for second, before finally choking out, "Doctor Heron isn't here anymore Diana."

She sighed, tugging the scissors out of the couch. "I know. But sometimes I think it would be easier if he were."

She moved to the top of his head, starting with the hairs in the back that always stuck up. "I need to get out of here, Caine."

"Well so do I, but I don't see any boats."

Diana fought down a shudder, her hands seemed to be twitching more than they should. She looked like she had Parkinson's or something. "I really, really have to leave this place, like, soon. something very very bad is going to happen if I don't."

Caine turned around in his chair and looked at her. "Like what? Don't be stupid. If anything, we're safer than we were back on the mainland. There are no coyotes, no-"

Diana was holding the blade of the scissors right against Cain's throat. "I don't think you fully understand me, love. I _need _to get back to the mainland. I will fucking swim."

Caine gripped her wrist. There was something in her voice. What? Desperation? Madness? "Diana, I'm going to count to three. One..."

There was a catch in her voice. "I have to. I have to go. I c-can't."

"Two..."

"You don't understand! If I don't, something bad is going to happen!" Tears were rolling down her face, turning her eyes red and her nose pink. She clutched the scissors harder.

"Three!"

Caine pushed at her with his mind and the palms of his hands. She flew across the room and hung, suspended next to the chandelier in the atrium. She writhed and struggled against her bonds. She was a demon in a cell, an angel trapped by clouds. How does she still look beautiful? Caine wondered.

Diana lurched up and down, her eyes blank. She looked at him with such loathing that he almost wanted to take a step back.

"Caine..." There it was again, that something in her voice. "Do as I say. You vowed to serve me, didn't you Caine?"

That was when Caine moved back. He knew what was in her voice now. He knew what was in her mind. She may as well have been glowing green.


	7. Diana's Will

"Do it."

"No."

"Do it."

"I won't."

It was dark, really dark. Diana knew that something was wrong, but only in the way that you can know you're forgetting something and not know what. She knew that all was not well. And she knew nothing else.

Her feet dangled beneath her, not touching ground. Below her was a checkerboard tile floor and above her was a needlessly frilly looking chandelier. Diana didn't know why she was flying, but she didn't know much these days.

She didn't know why there was a voice in her head.

"Make him do it."

"No."

"You must obey me! Obey the Darkness, Diana."

"I can't! I've caused enough pain!"

Oh yeah.

That's right.

Diana remembered now.

She wouldn't let The Darkness have its way. That was why she could barely see, why her vision was blurrier than an 80 year-old's, like she couldn't look out of her own eyes properly, Why she had been strung up by Caine like a demented puppet. That was why she couldn't control her own mouth.

"Release her, Caine. Release me. You don't want her hurt, do you, Caine? I will hurt her, Caine. You know my power. You know what I can do with her mind." Said the thing that was not Diana.

And there was Caine, obscured my the shadow of the doorway, looking up at her in horror. He should really calm down. Diana wished he would stop crying, the tears looked so unnatural on his handsomely cruel face, made him look so much younger and so much weaker. He looked ready to break, to give in.

But he couldn't! Diana couldn't let him free the thing inside of her. The Darkness only wanted to cause pain and suffering, and damn the consequences. Diana couldn't allow that. She wouldn't. It was decided. She would not bend. She would not let it win. Diana would have nothing more to be guilty about.

And if The Darkness broke her?

Well.

She deserved it, didn't she?


	8. Caine's Plans

Caine looked in horror at What Was Once Diana.

For once, he had no idea what to do. Even in the worst of sticky situations, he always had something chugging away in the back of his mind, a "just in case" department in his brain ready to kick into action when things went down. But not now. Now, he was frozen.

It looked like her, it's voice was her's, its paleness, its chopped off hair, its bags under the eyes were hers, but Diana was gone.

"Release her, Caine. Release me. You don't want her hurt, do you, Caine? I will hurt her, Caine. You know my power. You know what I can do with her mind." Said the thing that was not Diana.

Well what now? What now, Caine?

He wished he could let her go. Something was just so wrong about dangling her seven feet in the air when she was so hurt, but he knew he couldn't free The Darkness. They weren't on the same side anymore, The Darkness and he. IT was that simple. Caine had taken too much from it to let it be, to let it go free and wreak havoc.

And now that thing had Diana.

What now, Caine? No big plans?

He felt something wet on his cheek. He was crying. Boys his age weren't supposed to cry, but was he really a boy in the FAYZ? Noone is a kid in the FAYZ, where you age 20 years in a month. Were men allowed to cry? Perhaps there was some kind of if-the-girl-you-love-is-being-controlled-by-some-kind-of-glowing-radioactive-space-creature-then-you're-allowed-to-cry rule. Not relevant. Think, Caine, think!

"Let's make a deal." Said Caine.

The Darkness shuddered.

"No, Caine, don't! We cannot bend!" cried Diana.

Then The Thing convulsed and was itself once more.

What now, Caine?


End file.
